David Stodder has a great expert analysis at Intelligent Enterprise, which considers the two recent announcements in the MDM world (Informatica's purchase of Siperian and Talend's announcement of its open source MDM product). I left this comment over there:

"One aspect to consider is the fact that the desire for implementing master data management is usually a symptom of deeper data management issues that have not been resolved. The promise of a "golden copy" or "single source of truth" belies the need for higher quality entity data. The problem is indeed as suggested in David's article: the people buying the solution have not thought out the scope of the work involved in transitioning an *enterprise* (with its scores, if not hundred or thousands of independent applications and spreadbasemarts) to committing to the use of a single "master data asset." So you end up with siloed master data implementations (which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one) that serve smaller workgroups. (Psst: really, that MDM implementation is YAID - yet another inconsistent database).

 Talend does have an interesting strategy, particularly from the perspective of the clean slate. If your organization is flexible enough to assemble an enterprise strategy and then build towards that strategy, the "developer" approach actually might be good for maintaining a consistent, unified view of the critical business concepts through which the applications execute the business.

 So I have started to see some of our clients think about MDM from a different point of view. Instead of thinking about it as the single data asset for the business, they are looking at it as a tool to achieve the objectives that inspired the need in the first place - consistency, accuracy, high quality customer records. In turn, they are using the master data services to help filter out bad data in the first place, which essentially "bakes" the governance into the applications (the same way error handling is built into software)."

Meanwhile, I dealt with a lot of the questions that David Stodder has raised in the book that I wrote on Master Data Management, which apparently is being sold at a 48% discount at Amazon.